A Biography of a Person and a Book

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shulamit S. Magnus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Pauline Wengeroff and her Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. Wengeroff's two volumes are extraordinary on many grounds. As their full title proclaims, she writes the history of an era in Jewish experience, coupling her story and that of her family with that of Russian Jewry in the time of its transition from tradition to modernity. In Memoirs, Wengeroff gives a rich depiction of traditional Jewish society in Russia with a particular focus on the religious practices and piety of women. She tells a dramatic tale of the dissolution of traditionalism in this society from the perspective of women, marriage, and families. Indeed, she argues for the cultural power of women, though not as a feminist. Focusing on Wengeroff's adolescent and adult life, this book traces how Memoirs of a Grandmother came to be in the form in which it is found.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Cultural Science ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

Officers’ contributions to Britain’s anti-slavery culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Naval Officers

This chapter examines officers’ contributions to the metropolitan discourses about slavery and abolition taking place in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Furthering the theme of naval officers playing an important part in the social and cultural history of the West African campaign, it uncovers connections between the Royal Navy and domestic anti-slavery networks, and the extent to which abolitionist societies and interest groups operating in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships with naval officers in the field. Officers contributed to this ever-evolving anti-slavery culture: through support of societies and by providing key testimonies and evidence about the unrelenting transatlantic slave trade. Their representations of the slave trade were used to champion the abolitionist cause, as well as the role of the Royal Navy, in parliament, the press and other public arenas.

Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History

2007 ◽  
pp. 131-153
Author(s):  
Moshe Rosman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Significant Measure

This chapter analyses the Jewish spirit. It approaches the cultural history of a traditional society, as Jewish society was everywhere until the onset of modernity, by examining the history of the interaction of a society and its members with their collective history. Nationalist-inspired scholarship produced a Jewish political history. The Jewish historiography created in the decades after the Shoah and the establishment of Israel has turned in significant measure to social history. The postmodern age that has been so occupied with the deconstruction of symbols and meanings that were previously self-evident would seem to have prepared the ground for a new synthesis of cultural meaning. The chapter thus returns to the study of the spirit; not what it produced, but what it was.

Mythic Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jay Lockenour
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
German History ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Great War

This introductory chapter discusses Erich Ludendorff’s postwar political machinations, his publications, his conspiracy theories and his spiritual quest. It illustrates how the German World War I hero played a significant role in the country’s crucial moment when they sought to build a new Germany out of the ruins of the Empire and the Great War. In order to achieve a more complete understanding of Ludendorff’s place in German history after 1918 (including the post-1945 history of the Federal Republic of Germany), the chapter takes a biographical approach that differs from traditional biography and focuses on the two battles from 1914, Liège and Tannenberg, which appear out of all proportion in Ludendorff’s postwar writings. These battles establish characteristics — bold, courageous action and operational genius in defense of Germany — that Ludendorff wanted to associate with his mythos. It then examines Ludendorff’s struggles to create a “mythos.” That mythos allowed Ludendorff to tap into deep wellsprings of cultural power and symbolism. Ultimately, the chapter gives significant attention to Ludendorff’s importance as a prolific writer — of autobiography, political commentary, pseudo philosophy and history, and prophecy.

Gerry Knowles, A cultural history of the English language. London: Arnold, 1997. Pp. x, 180. Hb $59.95, pb $20.00.

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-133
Author(s):  
Richard W. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Linguistic Form ◽  
Language And Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
As If

In his preface, Knowles makes clear what his book is not. It is not a history of literary English, and it is not an account of changes in linguistic form; it is a “cultural history.” In the introductory chapter, he declares: “In view of the close connection between language and power, it is impossible to treat the history of the language without reference to politics” (9). Of course, books that purport to be histories of English have often “treated” the subject without apparent politics. Knowles is right in alleging that the politics of such books has often been implicit, since most of them provide information about the ascent of one variety of the language to the elevated status of a standard – as if that were an inevitable and desirable result of the spirit of goodness working itself out through speech.

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